There are various contexts in which it is useful to extract aggregated and anonymized information relating to users of a platform.
For example, understanding what content audiences are publishing and consuming on social media platforms has been a goal for many for a long time. The value of social data is estimated at $1.3 trillion but most of it is untapped. Extracting the relevant information is challenging because of the vast quantity and variety of social media content that exists, and the sheer number of users on popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. It is also made even more challenging because preserving the privacy of the social media users is of the utmost importance.
A data platform that is available today under the name DataSift PYLON connects to real-time feeds of social data from various social media platforms (data sources), uncovers insights with sophisticated data augmentation, filtering and classification engine, and provides the data for analysis with an appropriate privacy protocol required by the data sources.
It allows insights to be drawn from posts, shares, re-shares, likes, comments, views, clicks and other social interactions across those social media platforms. A privacy-first approach is adopted to the social media data, whereby (among other things) results are exclusively provided in an aggregate and anonymized form that makes it impossible to identify any of the social media users individually.
In the context of event processing, the need arises in various contexts to analyze numbers of unique users on a platform—not only social media platforms where the events correspond to social interactions, but other types of platform with other types of user event.